It's probably the biggest, bestest, hardestest proof of 'worse is better' anyone could think of. The system is so dumb and inconsistent and simplistic it's actually a selling point: 'everyone in my team knows yaml' is an argument I kept hearing, but this conveniently ignores the fact that a) yaml is a serialization format, not a business logic description language b) the values in the yamls are a cursed mix of shell, whatever js variant it is c) actions themselves are mixes of scripts that accept completely schemaless values, so good luck figuring things out (at least in the pre-LLM era, anyway).

It's like everyone collectively agreed that assembly is bad, yes, but building CI/CD in assembly is actually good.